Why I Support the Conservatives, or Danger Rob Calls Carney a Trump-Like Name

Quinn: So you support Poilievre, or as I like to call him, "Trump jr"? Why should Canadians listen to what you think about this?

Danger: Well, as you know Quinn, I'm just a guy who works with a chainsaw. But you're right, compared to Carney, who has said he "knows how the world works" and that he has personally "built strong economies," I don't have that kind of expertise at all.

Quinn: Ew.  Okay. So you don't have any special reason for me to be talking to you. Well anyway, let me start with an obvious question: You support the Conservative Party. Why would you do something like that? 

Danger: I agree with Poilievre that Canada should be governed from the bottom up, and not from the top down, like the Liberals would do.

Quinn: And what do you mean by that? You think that Canada needs a populist like Trump in charge of things?

Danger: So you think a lifelong parliamentarian who quotes John Diefenbaker and Milton Friedman a is like Trump, and a rich businessman with a pattern of casual lying and an ego that keeps him from hearing criticism is nothing like Trump?

Quinn: Hey now. We appreciate different opinions on this network, but you still have to respect the facts. And the fact is that Pierre sounds a lot like a certain orange-haired authoritarian threatening to turn us into the 51st State south of the border. I mean "Canada First"? "Carbon-Tax Carney"? How do you respond to that?

Danger: You know patriotism is in fashion again in Canada. Do you actually have an issue with the substance of the idea of prioritizing Canadians' interests? Or you think Trump has cornered the market on nicknames and alliteration?

Quinn: It's the aggressive style, the slogans, and... and.. yes, those the alliterative nicknames! So I ask you again: don't you care about the facts?

Danger: How about this fact? You have made a decision to only focus on a narrow range of facts about Poilievre and are using it to promote Carney's chances in the election. For one thing: Poilievre's style includes more than entertaining soundbites. Why don't you ever mention the multiple-hour long talks, citing the world's leading economists while giving an account of the cost-of-living crisis facing Canadians? If you weren't so biased, you might appreciate that the conservatives have gone into more depth explaining the reasoning behind their policies than is typical for a political party, and certainly more than Carney has. With Carney we're asked to trust his expertise; Poilievre explains his reasons in plain language. Being able to explain complicated issues in plain language is better evidence of intelligence than citing your credentials, in my humble opinion.

Quinn: No way I'm letting you get away with that. Putting things too simply can also obfuscate reality that requires real expertise to understand.

Danger: So, let me get this straight. Constantly implying that Poilievre is like Trump because they both use alliterative nicknames is just fine, but explaining how lagging productivity under the Liberals has led to a cost of living crisis is too simple?

Quinn: Now who's attacking the media. Sounds a lot like Trum -- [cough] I mean Poilievre

Danger: I just heard a CBC presenter say that Poilievre opening his mouth makes her ovaries shrivel up because he used the phrase "biological clock."

Quinn: HOW DARE YOU! And that is objectively true. Her ovaries do shrivel up.

Danger: Sure, it's a sensitive topic, but "biological clock" is a common phrase that doesn't imply any insult. It's almost as if your visceral disgust of conservatives motivates the criticism and you make up a pretext afterwards.

Quinn: "Biological Clock" is deeply offensive! We are news experts, which means we say what's true, not you.

Danger: Do you mind if we explore the Trump comparison with a little more nuance?

Quinn: [sighs deeply] If we have to. Be my guest.

Danger: If you were open to an actual understanding of Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, you would know by now that Poilievre is a fusionist like William F. Buckley. That is, he combines a belief in freedom and free markets with more traditional conservative values like love of home, history, community, and family. Fusionism was the philosophy held by those who defeated the Soviet Union, ended the Cold War, and brought about the neoliberal regime of free trade that Donald Trump is currently threatening to tear apart. So, if you're looking for an asp-tongued politician to compare him to, think Brian Mulroney, not Donald Trump.

And notice that Poilievre is, philosophically speaking, totally opposed to Donald Trump's tariff war on Canada - much more so than Carney.

Quinn: Oh give me a break...

Danger: Oh really? So the Liberal-voters you've interviewed over the years have always talked glowingly of the neo-liberal order of free trade, have they? I recall "neoliberal" being an insult on the Left 5 seconds ago -- before it became Trump's target. 

Look, I work in the forestry industry. Did you know that last year, the Biden administration raised the tariffs on softwood lumber from 7-something to 14-something percent. Only Poilievre has mentioned it among leaders as far as I'm aware and only Conservatives were talking about it before the election season. The Liberal Party under Trudeau didn't lift a finger to eliminate these tariffs before the election was called. 

In the current crisis, Carney is leaning into the outrage Canadians feel at being attacked, rather than promoting policies that would restore the economic relations that have delivered so much wealth to our country over the last 3 decades. He talks about pivoting to Europe and other markets around the world. Only Poilievre talks about diversifying export markets AND renegotiating a free trade agreement with the US, which may not sound as dramatic but would deliver better results for Canadians.

Quinn: Right, right. That's a lot of big words for someone who works with a chainsaw. Surely you're not denying that Poilievre is a populist like Donald Trump?

Danger: Trump has promised to make America great again. His populism is based on a his plan to use tariffs and how he can bring back manufacturing to middle America. Poilievre has promised to rein in government spending and focus on core responsibilities like defense, crime, and effective social services. In contrast to Trump, his populism is based on humility about what he can achieve in government and respect for the knowledge and ability of the citizens of Canada to look after themselves.

Both Carney and Trump want more power and more money concentrated in their hands because they believe they know what is the right direction for the country they are leading.  By contrast, Poilievre wants more power and more money in the hands of citizens because he believes they know better how to spend their money to grow the economy.

Quinn: Oh come on... How could plumbers and carpenters know more than an Oxford....

Danger: What? What were going to say? 

Quinn: Oh nothing.... 

Danger: Spit it out Quinn. You think Carney's economics degree from Oxford means he has more relevant knowledge than the average Canadian about how the money in this country should be spent.

Quinn: Well, I mean...

Danger: Don't be shy about it. It's an understandable belief. It just happens to be false. Are you ready for some more big words?

Quinn: Lay it on me, Chuck.

Danger: Let's start with the fact that there are economists just as qualified as Carney behind Trump's tariff plans. In other words, if an appeal to Carney's authority as an economist were enough to convince us he knows what he's doing with money, there should be a consensus among economists that his plan is better than Trump's. No such consensus exists.

Next, let's consider the fact that the future Carney wants to achieve is beyond the knowledge of any possible expert.

Quinn: Are you talking about the future that so many experts tell us will come about? The energy transition to reach net zero carbon emissions?

Danger: That's the very one. This is the future Carney wants to use the Canadian government to bring about, just like Trudeau's Liberal government before him. But now think about what you just said. I respect experts when they speak strictly within their field, but knowing the future is outside any field of expertise. Consider that in the last 20 years, energy production was shifted in unpredictable ways by the fracking revolution of 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. None of the experts you mentioned knew these things were going to happen before they did, and yet they all transformed global energy production. 

And its not as if this philosophy is limited to something as small as  global energy production. The Liberals have the same "government-knows-best" approach to every issue. That's how you know it's an ideology not simply an appeal to legitimate expertise. Did you know that, according to the Liberals, they know better than you what you should consume online. Did your listeners know that right now government panels are hearing from interest groups across the country about what Canadian content should be promoted on their various feeds online? It's true. Bill C-11, which expands the CRTC's mandate to cover the internet, has already passed. Only a Conservative victory will keep our internet from being curated by a government committee. And it's the same is true with legal gun ownership, which news coverage Liberals want you to watch, how much energy they should use, and regulations of all kinds. Carney will use corporate subsidies, regulation, and bureaucracy to lead Canada toward a future with no oil and with a greater relationship with Europe than with the U.S.. The Liberals are planning on $130 billion dollars of additional spending, which is over twice the amount they promised to spend in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Quinn: Hey, don't get so worked up!

Danger: The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek - a bigger deal in economics than Carney is, if you can imagine that - had a word for this approach to governing a country. He called it "fatal conceit." It is a conceit to think that a single central bank governor, or even a group of experts, can direct or design an economy. As Hayek writes, "the totality of events to which the modern market order constantly adapts itself is indeed unknown to anybody." Think of the accumulated know-how of all the small business owners and workers of Canada, and think of the knowledge all the mothers of Canada have of the needs of their households. It is this knowledge that is made use of in a free economy. No expert could possibly  "know how the world works" in this sense, as Carney says he does. For Hayek, "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design" (The Fatal Conceit 76). Carney thinks he can design Canada. In other words, he's Fatal Conceit Carney.

Quinn: Trumnp! Truump! You're Trump!

Danger: Quinn, focus. Focus. Try to focus on the point I was making. Do you really think Carney has the knowledge necessary to design an economy because he has a PhD in game theory and has made hard decisions about interest rates.

Quinn: I don't know. I think he might...

Danger: There's not a chance. This might surprise you, but I've spent some time in academia. I loved what I learnt there and a lot of people have real, specialized knowledge. But if you spend enough time there, you'll discover that not everything that comes out of an academics' mouth is knowledgeable. In addition to gaining specialized knowledge, academics also learn to bullsh*t. And Carney bullsh*ts a lot. He said that all of the US's semiconductors come from Canada - which he absolutely made up on the spot. And here he is using pseudo-logical language to avoid addressing a tough question posed by Rosemary Barton.

Look, if Carney's expertise were scientific in any meaningful way, then he shouldn't just be asserting he knows how the future is going to go and appealing to his resume. He should be appealing to true predictions he has made on the basis of his economic theories. 

Let's consider the inflation which has been the greatest disaster for Canadians' cost of living in at least a generation. Well, in December 2020, Mark Carney said, "Do I worry about inflation? I think it is unlikely to materialize to a serious extent. And, in fact, we need some inflation." Oopsy poopsy. You really think he knows enough to fix the cost of living crisis?

Quinn: Well, if no one knows the future, how is Poilievre any better? Huh? Huh?

Danger: Let's start with the fact that Poilievre correctly predicted that inflation would result from Liberal policies during the pandemic. Turns out Carney was too clever for his own good and basic principles of supply and demand were enough to know what was going to happen.

But the key point is this: Poilievre's bottom-up approach to governance makes use of knowledge spread across Canada. If the people of Canada are more free and have more money to spend compared to the government, more of their knowledge about what they need and how things work is used in building Canada's wealth. Poilievre's government would be more knowledgeable than Carney's -- that is, it would make use of more knowledge overall -- not because Poilievre himself knows more than Carney -- although I think that he does with all the Canadians he has talked to over the last 2 years -- but because Poilievre's government allows more room for the knowledge of average Canadians to be used in the economy.

Quinn: Populist! populist! You're a populist!

Danger: Okay let me explain it with bigger words for you. 

Quinn: Okay, okay, that would help make things more believable for me.

Danger: The abstractions of those who talk about markets do not adequately capture the experience of those actually working in a certain sector. Everyone who works in the private sector who has dealt with government regulations has come across regulations that make no sense. They're absolutely mad; not feasible in the least, and if everyone followed them to the letter -- the sector would just collapse. This is not a common phenomenon because regulators and economists are unintelligent. On the contrary. It is common because those who are acting in a market are responding to multiple costs, risks, prospects, and values in a dynamic system and and they are balancing them all in the decisions they make. They are like an animal well-adapted to its ecosystem, while the regulator is like a scientist who may describe parts of the system beautifully but whose knowledge, if it could be communicated, would nevertheless be an inadequate guide to the animal about how to live. In terms of abstract knowledge, the animal knows far less than the ecologist. And yet in terms of instinctual knowledge about how to survive, the animal knows far more. It's the same with consumers and business-owners in the economy. This is why regulation produced by very intelligent, well-meaning people can be so off in practice. 

Quinn: *blows raspberries* You must hate the environment! *blows more raspberries* You don't believe in climate change!

Danger: Come on, Quinn. Don't go full NDP! Calm down! I can give you some more big words, if you like.

Quinn: Yes. [breathing becoming more calm measured]. Give me more big words; big, experty words.

Danger: The economist Thomas Sowell further explains that the knowledge that a typical worker or business owner has is less abstract and more particular than that of regulators, but it is also more certain. This is because their knowledge goes through a rigorous authentication process. For example, a car mechanic's ideas about what is causing a car not to run are authenticated or not by whether he can make the car run or not. A coffee shop owner's ideas about what makes for good coffee are authenticated by whether or not customers buy the coffee. By contrast, Carney's ideas about how the world works -- which he asserts so confidently -- are not authenticated in a similarly rigorous way.  If he has multiple high-level meetings and then decides to not raise interest rates, the decision may be based on a lot of sensible considerations. But it will be months or years before the decision can be tested, if it ever is, and by that time no one remembers to hold him accountable for it. If Carney predicts that inflation will not occur and then it does, he gets a free pass, unlike the car mechanic or coffee shop owner. Carney can appeal to his experience and his Ph.D. and then, despite his colossal error, ask to be the Prime Minister of Canada. In other words, the more abstract knowledge that he has is less not more certain than the concrete know-how of a business owner or worker (Sowell, Knowledge and Decision, 10).

And here's another crucial point: The specialization that is part of contemporary civilization -- something that Carney and the typical worker share -- coincides with a lack of knowledge about how the whole thing works. We each know how to do our little part in society well, but we're easily deluded about how much we know about what makes the world around us go. This is a feature, not a bug, of developed civilization because it means that nobody has to go through the costly process of learning about everything that sustains them to achieve a high quality of life. But it does mean that we can easily over-estimate how much really know about how the world works (Sowell, Knowledge and Decision, 7). And yet this is the type of knowledge -- knowledge about how the world really works -- that Carney's Liberals want to use to build Canada's economy.

Quinn: Okay, maybe. Can we change topics? What about climate change? This is one thing that the Liberals are definitely better on. I mean, the Conservatives don't even have a plan!

Danger: You must think that because Carney talks about climate change a lot, and has promised to spend so much money on it, that it's safe to conclude that the Liberal government will be better for our planet?

Quinn: Well, yes, I would assume that.

 Danger: Well consider this true story that happened during the flood in Abbotsford several years ago. A government department with a building on the valley floor had a fleet of electric vehicles. As the flood waters rose, and farmers -- using their best judgement and the knowledge available to them about all the values and risks in involved -- decided to brave the water and save their cattle, do you know what the government employees who worked in that building did?

Quinn: Followed the rules better than those farmers I'm sure.

Danger: Yes, they did not respond to any of the risks and values that the farmers did. They did absolutely nothing and let the water slowly rise until it destroyed the fleet of electric vehicles. Maybe they were correctly following instructions they received from above. The point is: How good was that for the environment?

Quinn: Sounds like anecdotal evidence to me....

Danger:  I've got an anecdote like that for every honest person I meet who works in a government department. And I have my own stories too. You may find this surprising, but I don't just cut trees down. I am also a tree planter. One more of those complexities that's hard to capture in abstraction. Anyway, planting trees for the government was different than planting trees for logging companies, because the logging companies cared if the trees lived. When we planted for the government, there was a caterpillar infestation and all of our trees were eaten hours to days after they were planted. The forester told us that he didn't care, that too many things were already in motion, and we should plant the trees anyway.

You don't believe this kind of flagrant waste is widespread? When the Attorney General looked into government contracts made with McKinsey by dozens of government departments and crown corporations, they found "a frequent disregard for federal contracting and procurement policies and guidance. We also found that each organizations own practices often did not demonstrate value for money."

Quinn: Okay, fine....

Danger: You want to hear more?

Quinn: I think that's enough...

Danger: It's not that those who work in government are bad people or that they don't work hard. It is that there has been too much intervention in the human ecosystem and that these people are not getting the right feedback in order to make common sense decisions and create value efficiently for their fellow citizens or the environment.

So, do I know that a Liberal government will be better for climate change? I don't know that at all. Are we going to build a bunch of solar power that gets scraped for some unforeseen reason in 5 years? Are we going to tax and regulate the country into degrowth, stripping wild fire services of the public funds needed to fight forest fires which then belch out carbon emissions on the scale of the yearly economic activity in India -- like they did in 2023? Will the Conservatives' plan to replace coal energy in India with Canadian natural gas reduce global emissions? I have no idea, and the best anyone has is a guess. It's time we were all a little humbler about how much we know about how the world works -- and I for one would like a humbler government.

Quinn: So just laissez-faire everything then? That's your solution?

Danger: No, we're not in a high school debating class. We know that certain, well-proven public services like public health care are worth saving, even if they are not performing well right now. The conservatives have no cuts to health care or similar services in their platform. 

Ecosystems can be managed to a degree. Management just becomes too onerous when there is too much direction from above and not enough direction from below. Consider the sector I work in: silviculture. We manage the forests with great expertise and skill in order to benefit from the production of timber, while also considering the health of ecosystems, the value of recreation, and indigenous practices on the land. Yet, we still got things really unbalanced with the wildfires. If we would not have intervened in the forests as much as we did, then there would have been more deciduous trees in the understorey and it would be much harder for forest fires to spread. But the point is not that there should be no intervention in our forests, as we gain immense value from our forestry activities. The point is we need to be humble in our interventions into the forest. And the same applies to Canada's economy. The Conservatives do not want a free-for-all economy. They think government intervention has become too heavy-handed, too proud, too conceited, and that we need a recalibration to allow more productivity and creativity to grow from the bottom-up.

Quinn: Oh please, tell me more.

Danger: Conservationists who engage in habitat restoration are intervening in ecosystems, but they are doing so in a way that buoys up processes already occurring naturally in that ecosystem. The conservatives interventions in the economy are like this. For example, they want to give money to drug recovery centers based on the results they achieve getting addicts off of drugs. This example demonstrates why the humbler approach to government is also much smarter. No matter how smart the experts are who advise Carney on drug policy, they will never be as smart as all those institutions working on the ground who actually find ways of getting people off drugs.

Quinn: Okay, I've had my fill of big words. You've presented a lot of interesting ideas here today.

Danger: If you're looking for evidence for what I say, then the best place to look is the last 10 years of Liberal governance. The economic record of the liberals is of slow growth, slow productivity which is a sign of slow growth in the future, not to mention the the inflation crisis we experienced for the last two years. This has caused real wages to decrease relative to the goods and services available in the economy, most notably housing. Liberal results have been bad.

Quinn: The economy's not everything, you know....

Danger: It's true that economic growth fails to capture everything of value in life. But it does capture a major, ongoing production of value for Canadians, especially when it is long-term economic growth. The value of economic growth was made evident in the inflation that we all just went through. Because currency inflated, wage-earners and savers grew poorer. People found it harder to have a home, buy nutritious food when per-capita economic growth stalled. As the economist Tyler Cowen writes, "the history of economic growth indicates that, with some qualifications, growth alleviates misery, improves happiness and opportunity, and lengthens lives." (Cowen, Stubborn Attachments 33)

Quinn: But isn't Carney different than the Liberals?

Danger: History will never be a perfect laboratory experiment, and so there will always be a way to rationalize another Liberal term. But it isn't plausible. Carney has the same government-knows-best ideology as Trudeau, and Trudeau's staff hand-picked Carney to replace him. They remain the people behind the scenes in the Liberal Party. Do you think there weren't smart economists like Carney on Trudeau's team when he made all his promises to fix Canadians' problems by spending money?

Poilievre has put in the work, listening to Canadians all over the country. He's run a tight campaign. The attacks against him are either extremely weak or outright smears. If you wanted to run the experiment about what a humbler government with a lighter touch might do for Canada, don't be put off by caricatures. You could do a lot worse than Pierre Poilievre. Maybe you disagree with him, and think that Carney has a more compelling vision for Canada's future. But at least base your decision on a principled understanding of his conservatism.

Quinn: There you have it, a tree destroyer who supports Trump jr..